The dangerous war on ‘whiteness’

Telling white people to be more conscious of their whiteness is a recipe for disaster.

Whiteness is everywhere these days – or talk of it is, at least. BBC Two has commissioned a two-part documentary-cum-social experiment all about ‘whiteness’, to be fronted by identitarian commentator Afua Hirsch. Bestselling books talk of White Fragility and Dying of Whiteness.

Political upheavals are said to be driven by Whiteshift. Apparently, Brexit is a product of ‘hideous’ and ‘unbearable’ whiteness, while the election of Trump was evidence of a ‘whitelash’. Geopolitical events like the US trade war with China are also attributed to ‘the religion of whiteness’, which according to the New York Times, ‘increasingly resembles a suicide cult’.

There are several problems with this rush to attribute anything and everything to ‘whiteness’. First of all, nobody can really pin down what exactly whiteness is. Whiteness is said to be all powerful and all pervasive, but it seems to resist definition even among those who talk endlessly about it. ‘If whiteness takes no shape, then the concrete structures that shaped it (and often benefit from it) remain invisible too’, says Mona Chalabi in the Guardian.

Chalabi crunches the data on the strange invisible phenomenon of ‘white culture’ and finds out that white people like the arts, alcohol and dairy products. This may seem benign, but don’t be fooled. ‘If the “somethingness” of white culture is never quite pinned down, it remains both “nothing, really” and “well, everything”’. That ‘nothingness’ is not morally neutral. For Chalabi, the ‘vagueness’ of white culture leaves the door open for the forces of whiteness to ‘lay claim to every recipe, every garment, every idea that is not explicitly “non-white”’. Apparently, whiteness, lacking any substance of its own, cannibalises everything it touches.

The one thing that critics of whiteness seem to be sure of is that whiteness is inherently a very bad thing. Generally, white men are considered to be responsible for various social ills, though white women are also said to be part of the problem. Apparently, whiteness inflicts suffering on both non-whites and on whites themselves. Whiteness is held up as an explanation not only for racism and discrimination, but also for gun deaths and depression among whites. You don’t even have to be white to suffer from ‘internalised’ whiteness.

Needless to say, this obsession with whiteness is not good for race relations. At a time when racist attitudes are at an all-time low across the West, writers for the New York Times are asking questions like ‘Can my children be friends with white people?’ and ‘Should I give up on white people?’.

What’s more, the discussion about whiteness only reaffirms the idea that there is such a thing as white racial identity. White people are constantly told to think of themselves as white and to recognise their whiteness. The unintended consequence of this is to racialise society and to lend credence to the idea pushed by the racist right – that whites are a distinct racial group with their own distinct grievances and interests.

According to identitarian thinkers, whiteness persists because discussing whiteness is not something that comes naturally to white people. Whites have to become aware of their whiteness, and thus more able to confront their own privilege. Whites who have successfully uncovered their whiteness have probably read columns by Ta-Nehisi Coates (‘The First White President’), or books by Robin DiAngelo (White Fragility and What Does it Mean to be White?) and Reni Eddo-Lodge (Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race). Perhaps they have attended a ‘Critical Whiteness’ workshop at their university. Some rich white liberal women have stumped up $2,500 to learn about their whiteness over dinner.

Some writers have noticed that when you try to talk to certain white people about their whiteness (essentially anyone not part of the middle-class intelligentsia), they become defensive and agitated. Critics of whiteness call this response ‘white fragility’. For instance, Myriam François, founder of the website WeNeedToTalkAboutWhiteness.com, says, ‘We are swimming in toxic whiteness but take offence at anyone pointing it out’.

A simple explanation could be that most white people do not identify with whiteness and are annoyed by having a white identity ascribed to them. Of course, it doesn’t help that the identity that critics of whiteness expect white people to embrace is overwhelmingly negative.

To say that whiteness has been pathologised is not an overstatement or a metaphor. Academic Kehinde Andrews has written about the ‘psychosis of whiteness’. Some scholars of ‘critical whiteness studies’ argue that whiteness can be uncovered and overcome. But Andrews says whiteness is characterised by irrationality and is therefore beyond rational engagement.

Similarly, New York-based clinical psychiatrist Natascha Stovall wants to put whiteness on the couch. She wonders why the ‘obsessive’, ‘compulsive’ and ‘anxious’ white patients who frequent her practice insist on talking about their mental-health issues when they should be talking about whiteness. ‘We talk about everything. Except being white’, she complains.

White men are said to be permanently on edge because of their ‘white male rage’. White women apparently have a much better handle on their emotions, but they are said to emote in a dangerously white way. A Guardian article titled ‘How white women use strategic tears to silence women of colour’ makes the rather ludicrous assertion that white women’s ‘tearful displays are a form of emotional and psychological violence that reinforce the very system of white dominance that many white women claim to oppose’.

When identitarians use ‘white’ as basically a synonym for either ‘bad’, ‘deceptive’ or ‘irrational’, the appeal of such an identity is likely to be limited to self-loathing liberals. In turn, this thoroughly negative conception can make people on the receiving end of the ‘whiteness’ discourse increasingly defensive – especially if they were not born into the kind of ‘privilege’ identity politics ascribes to them.

This can give the far right more fruitful conditions in which to operate. If white people are constantly told to become conscious of their whiteness, it should not be a surprise if some react by saying they are in fact proud of the accident of their birth. That would truly take us down a dark path.

All of this raises questions as to why the (mostly white) establishment is so keen to embrace whiteness as an explanation for the world’s ills. One reason could be that identity politics, though often presented as a left-wing phenomenon, allows the elites to dispense with class analysis. Race, gender and sexuality replace class as the prisms through which the world can be understood and injustices can be railed against.

Indeed, whiteness is often coded in class terms, especially when used by other whites. Yes, Guardianistas will mouth off occasionally about the ‘pale, male and stale’ domination of company boards and high politics, but the descriptor ‘white’ contains the most venom when it is aimed at the lower orders. Class prejudice has historically been communicated using racial terms, and today’s woke intolerance of working-class people is no different.

When Myriam François, herself a white woman, wrote about ‘toxic whiteness’ and the ‘fury of white people’, she was responding to Jon Snow’s off-the-cuff ‘white people’ remark on Channel 4 News. Snow infamously said that he, a white man, had ‘never seen so many white people in one place’ at a pro-Brexit rally. Snow has surely been to Glastonbury, Wimbledon, pro-Remain marches and the European Parliament. These events and places are always full of white people, just middle-class ones – white people he is presumably more comfortable with. And so their skin colour doesn’t get a mention.

The obsession with whiteness ultimately has the effect of erasing class altogether. Indeed, the deployment of ‘white privilege’ seems like an explicit attempt to downplay class. It allows people with vastly different circumstances – everyone from Prince Harry to a plumber – to be labelled as inherently privileged. ‘You can be homeless and still have white privilege’, according to the ‘solidly middle-class’ model and Labour Party adviser, Munroe Bergdorf.

The obsession with whiteness is dangerous not only because it obscures the truth about class relations, but also because it encourages the very thing it claims to fight against: a racialised white identity. Instead of blaming all the world’s ills on a nebulous notion of whiteness, we should be arguing to eliminate racial thinking altogether.

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Yes, I am a race denier

Both the alt-right and the woke left want you to think racially. Don’t do it.

I got it in the neck from both racist-right wingers and supposedly anti-racist leftists last week. Hard-right racial agitators slammed me over my spiked column on Andrew Sabisky, in which I argued that the new right’s flirtation with the ‘science’ of IQ differences, and particularly with the idea that blacks are genetically less intelligent than whites, is dangerous and worrying.

Woke leftists, meanwhile, took me to task over my rather more throwaway piece on the rapper Dave and his performance at the BRITs, and my belief that the cultural elite’s racialisation of everything, its belief that racism is endemic in modern Britain, is wrong and divisive. The racists criticised me for ignoring the reality of race; the wokeists criticised me for ignoring the reality of racial experience in 21st-century Britain.

These two groups might look like polar opposites. The racist underbelly of the internet – which worryingly burst forth into Downing Street via the employment of Sabisky – tends to be a bit tragic. It consists primarily of atomised young men who think they are cleverer than they are and who are consumed by a virulent strain of white victimhood. They are widely mocked by contemporary culture. The woke web, in contrast, is dynamic, energetic, very middle class, and widely celebrated by the political and cultural elites. From Twitter to TV discussion panels, from the academy to newspapers’ opinion pages, this new clique’s political views are increasingly mainstream. Witness the way in which trans extremism, ideas about ‘white privilege’ and the racial myopia of the identitarian worldview have moved into mainstream discussion and even popular culture in recent years.

And yet for all their different styles and success rates, these two groups share something incredibly important in common: they are obsessed with race. Genuinely, sometimes even hysterically obsessed with it. Indeed, my battering by both sides last week gave me a stark and enlightening realsation: both of these camps think of me, and presumably everyone else, as little more than a racial category. In my case, as a ‘white man’. The speed and firmness with which both sides reduced me to a white man was striking.

The racists, including in a weird YouTube video one of them made about me, informed me that I am a white man who is insufficiently proud of my white heritage or of my genetic superiority to blacks. The wokeists denounced me as a white man who, by dint of my cultural heritage, can have no understanding of the racial complexities of modern Britain. (Even worse, I am a ‘mediocre white man’, in the words of the people at Novara Media. Perhaps I need to make a greater effort to strive for Aryan non-mediocrity.)

To both groups, I am a disappointing white man. I am a disappointment to my race. The racist abusers of science who propagate the foul idea of white genetic superiority see me as a self-hating white man who refuses to acknowledge my genetic supremacy to people of colour. The wokeist promoters of identitarian difference see me as a self-denying white man who refuses to acknowledge my inherited privileges, the way in which history has bestowed on me the category of ‘privileged’ while bestowing on black people the category of ‘victim’.

Neither side allows reality to leak in. That I am less intelligent than many black people makes not a blind bit of difference to the racist right who think I should wallow in my ‘superiority’. That I come from an Irish working-class background and am a first-generation Briton makes no difference to the wokeist left who think I should self-flagellate for my ‘privilege’. All truth and nuance is erased by both the science and the culture of racial myopia; by both the scientific racists of the new right and the cultural racialists of the woke left.

What is becoming clear is that, tragically, the idea of race, the idea of insurmountable differences between people, is returning to public life. In fact, it never really went away. In recent decades, racial thinking has demonstrated an extraordinary capacity to change its nature, to reassert itself in new, apparently more acceptable ways. The reason there was a perfectly understandable angry reaction to the employment of Sabisky in Downing Street is because older, more ‘scientific’ forms of racism, such as have been expressed by Sabisky in the past, have been incredibly out of favour in recent decades.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, and of the horrors of the Holocaust in particular, the racist, eugenicist view of humanity as racial entities – some good, some degenerate – became unsustainable. That is, not only where these ideas scientifically wrong – as they had always been – but now their barbarism and backwardness had been fully exposed.

However, racial thinking did not disappear. Rather, it shifted from science to culture. The idea of racial difference was no longer scientifically argued. Instead it was claimed that culture and history were the determining factors in the division of identity groups and the moral divide between black and white people in particular. In the 1960s and 70s, sections of the right tended to push the idea of a deep, culturally divined split between the races. But more recently, it is the left that has embraced cultural racial determinism. First through the race-relations industry, then through the ideology of multiculturalism, and more recently through the entrenched, historically determined categories of white privilege and black victimhood, the new left has promoted a new and worryingly popular species of racial thinking.

That this new racial thinking can be as deterministic and divisive as the old racial thinking it replaced can be glimpsed in today’s casual disdain for white people and contempt for any person of colour who deviates from the politics of victimhood. The modern left has introduced a racialism as fixed as the racialism of old, to such an extent that they will berate anyone from any ‘racial’ category who fails to perform their racial role. A white person who questions the idea that he enjoys privilege or who agitates against the pressure to think racially will be instantly denounced as a naturally racist white person requiring moral correction.

A black person who pushes back against the politics of victimhood and refuses to think of him or herself as the damaged goods of bloody history will be written off as a self-hating person of colour, as someone who has internalised racism. That is, they lack the agency and autonomy to think for themselves and instead have been corrupted by their white masters. And so does the new racialism directly echo the old racism.

The new cultural racialism may not share the extreme authoritarianism and deranged destructiveness of the old scientific racism. But it has carried into the late 20th century and early 21st century many of the anti-humanist trends of racial thinking. It has its determinism, only now racial groups are said to be determined by history (Empire, slavery, colonialism) rather than biology. It has its racial dehumanisation, so that every nuance of class, experience and belief is erased in the rush to refer to people simply as ‘white man’ or ‘person of colour’.

It has at least a strain of its authoritarianism: witness the rush to censure those who question the new racialism and the way in which the boss class has introduced codes of conduct in the workplace that govern speech and relations between black and white workers. And it has its divisiveness. Black people are different to white people: that is the depressing, society-harming message of the new woke left as much as it was of the old racist right.

That we live in a new era of racial thinking, in which so much of educational, political and public life is organised around these new-sounding and dangerous racial ideas, is clear from the fact that it has become incredibly difficult to question and push back against woke racialisation. Indeed, there is now open ridicule of anyone who says: ‘I prefer the Martin Luther King approach of judging people by their character rather than skin colour.’ Woke activists mercilessly mock people who say this. In the US, some campuses describe such a worldview as a ‘racial microaggression’. So to argue against racial thinking is racist. This is mad, Orwellian nonsense.

We cannot let them demean and destroy the MLK belief that character is more important than colour, because this belief is the very essence of a progressive, humanist politics. Both the alt-right and the woke left want you to think racially. Refuse. Rebel. Do the right thing: view all people as individuals with agency, autonomy, aspirations and character, regardless of their skin colour, their ethnicity or their heritage. Fight for the King approach to humanity over the deeply destructive racialism of the flagging racist right and the ascendant woke left.

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Transgenderism: the great delusion of our time

One day it will be studied alongside witch-hunts and alien abductions.

The recent remark by Dawn Butler, shadow secretary of state for women and equalities, that ‘a child is born without sex’ is certainly one of the most bizarre things said by a politician in my lifetime. It is surprising that it hasn’t attracted more derision than it deserves. Or perhaps it isn’t. The transgender myth – that one’s actual sex, not one’s gender, is entirely of one’s own choosing – is firmly embedded as the definitive popular delusion of the 21st century. It will take future historians of a more rational age to assess it more soberly and explain its origins.

My theory is that it is the consequence of what might be called the Discrimination Dialectic. Our society is constantly at war with itself between two conflicting imperatives: the need to have an Other (every culture needs one) who we can define ourselves against and be mean about, and our more contemporary, and culturally specific, progressive imperative to ceaselessly end discrimination against minorities and erstwhile Others. This dialectic involves identifying, or maybe even inventing, the next Other in order to emancipate them.

When I was very young it was still acceptable to be a misogynist – television comedians still made jokes about wives and mothers-in-law – and it was acceptable in certain circles to be racist. Homophobia was even more mainstream well into the 1980s, when ‘poof’ and ‘homo’ were unremarkable playground insults.

Going back further, misogyny, racism and homophobia were all pretty mainstream in the 1960s. They are all taboo today. Most people under 30 probably don’t even know that Irish jokes were commonplace until the 1980s. So what discriminated Other should our society campaign for now? What minority can we be progressive about now? Trans people, it transpires.

It is owing to our culture’s cult of progress, and the liberal-left’s compulsion of forever ending discrimination, that the trans movement has captured the Labour Party so virulently. While Butler’s remark raised some eyebrows, a recent statement by the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, raised none, when he asserted that ‘Trans women are women. Trans men are men.’ Another transparent falsehood. A trans woman is a trans woman.

Trans is a powerful myth, which explains how it demands some curious mental gymnastics and strange doctrines. First was the notion that by having cosmetic surgery you can change your sex. (You can’t, because you can’t change your chromosomes or biology. I never have and never will menstruate or give birth.) Then came the idea that you can change your sex through performative utterance, by merely declaring you have done so. And now comes the literally – literally – unreal dogma that babies have no sex.

Most people, especially those of a woke persuasion, like to ridicule Christian creationists who believe the Earth is only 6,000 years old. They are certainly irritating, such is their wilful, wanton resistance to accept the overwhelming scientific evidence for evolution. True trans believers have become intolerable for exactly the same reason: their flight from reality and denial of not just science, but also what is staring them in the face. You don’t even need a doctor to tell what sex a baby is.

The trans movement began as an extension of the gay-rights movement. But since gays are nearly totally accepted now, it has usurped it. It has since morphed into something more uncanny: a modern-day cult. It’s an ersatz new religion, hence the doctrine among its believers that ‘transphobia’ is a most grievous transgression. Look, too, at the way people demand that strangers use pronouns of their choosing. And regard the degree to which people have internalised ‘transphobia’ as a modern-day blasphemy against this religion, a heresy against the church of trans, with so many people terrified to speak openly and honestly about it.

It is nothing more than a case of hysteria, a modern-day delusion, a phenomenon that one day will – or should – be studied alongside witch-hunts and alien abductions.

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Celebrities have forgotten their place

A new lifeform has emerged on the global stage. Actually, it’s more of a mutation than a new species. This organism can only survive in the rarefied atmosphere of the public spotlight, and it has been part of everyday life, first in movies and then in television, for the better part of a century. It can now be found in sport, music, politics, fashion, royalty – and social media, where it goes by the name “influencer”.

I am talking about the celebrity. In the old days – prior to the 1980s, say – celebrities knew their place; their job was to look pretty, to exude wit and/or charm, to dress glamorously and to attract fans. But today’s celebrities have extended this brief to include the opportunistic promotion of a popular cause. And with the awards industry flourishing, there are any number of platforms that enable today’s celebrities to pout, preen and pose on a red carpet just as they have always done, but with the added opportunity of offering “spontaneous” advice to the non-celebrity world about their pet subject. Climate change is a favourite.

Never mind that the celebrity lifestyle involves private jets, multiple homes and a range of egregious consumption sins committed against the environment. The unstated logic among this new breed of Celebrity Moralisers is that, while they do indeed live these apparently wasteful lifestyles, the payback is that they command vast audiences so “an earnest word about carbon emissions” delivered at precisely the right moment can have the effect of modifying the behaviour of millions. Millions!

Plus, moralising even momentarily from a public pulpit effectively rebrands the celebrity as not just a pretty face but as someone who’s a bit of a thinker, an ethicist; someone who is deeply concerned about the great moral challenges of the day. I mean, a celebrity isn’t going to shout “remember to floss” from the stage (vital though that is to dental hygiene); they’re going to promote a cause that is prominent, that contributes to their brand, and that can never be measured. It’s a win-win.

So it’s OK for Celebrity Moralisers to fly about, but not for you and me, and that’s because their carbon emissions are offset by the impact they can have in “bravely speaking out” and reining in the errant behaviour of the masses. In fact, moralising to millions is a lot like buying carbon offsets. It legitimises the celebrity lifestyle, it promotes their brand and, best of all, the impact of their courageous words can’t be quantified. How many people were persuaded to reduce carbon emissions as a consequence of moral posturing? Or does the value that celebrities bring lie with their ability to change the vibe?

In many ways, the cult of the celebrity is like a modern aristocracy in which the resources of the many are marshalled to support the lifestyle of the few. And when celebrities stuck to their core business of promoting their work, we accepted their position of privilege. But less so today.

In today’s world business leaders, politicians and others are very much held to account for espousing one standard while living another. The modern world abhors hypocrisy, or so we would like to believe.

And yet I somehow think that next year’s awards season will be littered with more causes, more symbols of solidarity, more brave words of support, because despite the callouts, the spoofs and the protest, we’ll move on and allow the Celebrity Moraliser to re-emerge stronger and poutier than ever. Hmmm… perhaps we’re more tolerant of hypocrisy than we would like to believe.

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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